For conservatives, hell may have frozen over on Sunday.
Rich Lowry, the editor of the National Review, said on PBS's McLaughlin Group referring to the perilously liberal Newsweek columnist named Clift, "Eleanor has hit it on the head" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
ELEANOR CLIFT, NEWSWEEK: I don't know that Republican primary voters are going to hold it against him that he got rich and that he learned how to work the capitalist system. Maybe they don't know about all of this, but I don't think this is going to be disqualifying. What Newt Gingrich has that Mitt Romney doesn't have is passion. And passion is what wins primaries. And Romney is running in a race where people really don't want to vote him.
And Newt is Newt. He's grandiose, he’s mercurial, he could self-implode a week from now, but he's been pretty disciplined since the Tiffany episode and the cruise, and he has been very shrewd in how he is presenting himself. So he could at least be the foil against Romney, and for the first time in this campaign, Romney is looking a little bit less inevitable.
CLIFT: Thank you.
LOWRY: If people believe he is a combative true blue conservative it will trump all this Newt Inc. stuff.
Of course, Clift for a change was 100 percent right.
But you didn't have to tell her that on national television, did you Rich?
